"Botticellophane": High Artifice and the Sanctity of Surface in Four Saints in Three Acts

Gertrude Stein’s libretto for Four Saints in Three Acts (1927) enjoys its status as a breakthrough of American modernism. The work also indexes an early representation of black subjectivity through an all-black cast. Florine Stettheimer’s designs for the original performance of Four Saintsare remarkable for their sensuous material components, including cellophane, lace, feathers, plastics, and more. Stettheimer’s designs include constructions of white, saintly adornments for black performers. One critic remarked that Stettheimer’s sets were “Botticellophane,” connecting the high artifice of her plastic tableaux with the early Florentine Renaissance painter. The works’ extensive inclusion of cellophane—specifically cellophane intended to be worn on stage—implicates the importance of the art objects’ shiny, diaphanous surfaces and their interplay with movement and light. The textual abstraction of Stein’s opacity and the visual iconicity of Stettheimer’s decoration overlap in modernist adoration of surface. The Stein text paired with Stettheimer’s designs provide a generative basis for considering the visual, material, and physical manifestations of American modernism’s relationship with alternative counternarratives such as camp, decoration, artifice, gender, and race.